Qantas is to start up daily Airbus A380 services between Melbourne and London and six weekly A380 services between Melbourne and Los Angeles. This would take place when its next tranche of superjumbos arrive later this year, announced its CEO Alan Joyce.
Currently, Qantas is operating two return services between Melbourne and London each week on the A380. This will increase to five services a week after Qantas’ eighth A380 is delivered, six services a week after its ninth is delivered and daily services when its 10th A380 arrives in March 2011.
The Melbourne-Los Angeles services, operated by the A380, will increase to four a week with the delivery of Qantas’ ninth A380 and to six a week after its 10th is delivered.
Qantas currently has six A380s in service. The delivery of its seventh in the final quarter of 2010 will enable Sydney-London A380 services to go daily.
The airline first flew the A380 between Melbourne and London via Singapore in January of this year. This benefited customers travelling from that city to London but also those flying into the Lion City from Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, Joyce observed. The extra frequencies would provide the much needed capacity, he added.
Describing the Melbourne-Los Angeles as an equally important trunk route for Qantas, Joyce rationalised the increased frequencies.
More than 550,000 passengers have flown on the A380 since it entered the Qantas fleet in 2008, and customer feedback, said Joyce, was "outstanding".
Other Qantas route enhancements
• Services between Sydney and Johannesburg will increase from six per week to daily from September 21, 2010 (South African Airways will continue to code share on all these services).
• It will expand the code share on British Airways services between London Heathrow and Europe to include six new destinations: Rome, Milan, Toulouse, Prague, Warsaw and Budapest (available for sale from June 14 for travel from July 21). This will take the number of Qantas code shares on BA services beyond London to 29 destinations in the UK and Europe.
• It will increase the frequency of its code sharing on services between Heathrow and Nice, Stockholm and Amsterdam.
• It will upgrade its four-times-weekly service between Sydney and Manila (including one service per week via Brisbane) from a Boeing B767 aircraft to an A330 aircraft.
For a look at the layout of the A380 aircraft operated by Singapore Airlines, Emirates, Qantas, Air France and Lufthansa, click news.
For more details, visit www.qantas.com.au
Margie T Logarta
